Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  The long silence flickered with invisible movement. “Margot,” said Patrick, “I love you.” The movement shimmered in his voice.

  The next morning Margot woke at six o’clock, riven by the half memory of Patrick on a damp gray day, holding his rough old coat about his bare neck, his full lips parted, dry granules of skin at one corner of his mouth. She couldn’t remember his eyes.

  She rolled to one side of her bed and tried to comfort herself by putting her palm and face against the warm place where she had been lying. Her memory surged voluptuously: he’d held her against his chest and she’d cried about Chiquita. She rested in and was upheld by his strength and his glandular boy’s resolve. She put her palm against his chest. He covered it with his hand. “I’ve thought about us,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. The artificial quality of his voice was pleasing in the way a song on a grocery store sound system can be pleasing. But it was not what she wanted.

  “Basically, I could take it or leave it,” he said.

  She sat up and stared at him. She got off the bed. “Then you can leave it,” she’d said.

  Now she rolled onto her back and pulled the blankets up to her chin. She remembered Roberta getting up to go to work one morning, pulling away from Margot’s embrace as she rolled naked from the bed. She’d yawned as she walked across the floor, swinging her slim hips. “Then you can leave it,” Margot said aloud.

  After that night, Margot had tried to act normal with Patrick, but it didn’t work. He was stilted and polite. When she asked him out for coffee, he couldn’t come. Breakfast conversations that should’ve been casual took sharp turns; innocuous comments seemed to have complicated, unseen meanings. Dolores and Donald looked on with sidelong glances. It seemed to her that Patrick had made her feel rejected for absolutely no reason when she couldn’t afford to feel that way. This idea made her indignant, and her indignation mounted with each odd conversational moment, finally rearing up to its full height one morning while Patrick was telling the house-hold about his disastrous encounter with two sisters, both of whom had briefly been lovers of his. There had been screaming, tears, awful accusations.

  “The absurd thing is, I like both of them a lot,” said Patrick. “But I didn’t really want to have sex with either one. All this could’ve been avoided if—”

  “Patrick,” said Margot, “if you didn’t want to have sex with them, then why did you?”

  He tipped his chair back and looked at her with insouciant tension. “Because they wanted to, mostly.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  Patrick shrugged and eased his chair back onto its four legs.

  As Margot left the room, she’d heard Donald say, “Isn’t she, like, supposed to be a lesbian?”

  They made plans for another dinner date, but Patrick canceled it because he had to fly to Los Angeles to tie up business related to his CD-ROM. The whole project was driving him crazy, he said. The psychiatrists were hell to work with; they were all deluded egomaniacs. And things were not going well with Tricia, who was being stalked by a biker with whom she’d had a one-night stand. His first urge of course was to protect her, but he was also disgusted with her for allowing such a situation to come about. “I mean, for so long, she was really living straight, you know? And I respected her for it. And now—”

  “Patrick,” said Margot abruptly, “how’s Dolores? Did you get her number for me?”

  “Oh, damn,” he said. “I forgot about that. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to think about her, it’s so sad. But I’ll get it.”

  When Margot got off the phone she felt that she didn’t want to talk to Patrick again, let alone see him. “What an asshole,” she said to her darkened hallway. Hours later, preparing for bed, she spat diluted toothpaste into the sink, looked at herself in the mirror, and said it again. Her hair was held back in a ratty terry-cloth band, and her features were stark, inturned, and convictionless.

  Once, on a brilliant spring day sixteen years before, she had come home just in time to see Patrick burst from their rented house with an enormous bundle in his arms. It was swathed in Dolores’s quilt, and it was apparently very heavy. Without speaking, he hurried past. He had put the bundle in his car and slammed the door before she realized that he had been carrying Dolores and that she was unconscious.

  Patrick hadn’t come back to the house until evening. From her room she’d heard him open the refrigerator, close it, and then go upstairs to his room. She stood at her door for an irresolute moment, then she followed him. He opened the door before she knocked. They sat on his bed, and he lay his head on her shoulder, hunching his body as if he were smaller than she. She stroked his head and neck. His pulse was fluxing like an electrical current. Dolores had tried to kill herself with the Valium their mother had sent him. He’d found her on the bathroom floor.

  Dolores came back from the hospital much the same as she had been before she left. She sat at the breakfast table for hours, affixing and polishing her false nails. Patrick slouched in the sun, and some-times his attention touched his sister like a traveling drop of light.

  He was supposed to call her during the next week to make another dinner appointment, but he didn’t. She didn’t call him, either, and as one week passed and then another, she thought of him less and less. She would’ve said that she’d forgotten him, except that occasionally his image would come to her, attached to thoughts or events that had no apparent relation to him, and inside her, a little tongue of feeling would fly up.

  One day at work, when she was on an intake phone shift, she received another phone call from the young man who believed he was being stalked.

  Margot didn’t tell him they’d already spoken, and he went into his story at a full gallop.

  “She keeps writing these fucked-up letters, and I don’t answer, except just to be polite I sent her this form letter I send all my friends, just to let everybody know what’s going on. And she called me and left this hysterical message on my machine, going on about how much I mean to her, and wanting to read me some poem—”

  “Tell me as clearly as you can,” said Margot. “What would you like me to do?”

  “—and when I called her back, she said she’d called because I’d answered her letter, but I didn’t! It was a computer-generated form letter; I didn’t even sign it! Hers were all personal, all handwritten! And they were sick! She’s going on about how she once drew a picture of me—I’ve never drawn a picture of anyone since I was, like, ten!”

  Margot held the phone away from her ear for a moment. The little tongue flew up. She shook her head and returned the receiver to her ear.

  “—and I said, ‘Oh, you like me, well, that’s very nice, why don’t you start a fan club?’”

  “Perhaps,” said Margot, “you might want to make an appointment to discuss this further with a psychiatrist. Other than that, I don’t—”

  He hung up.

  Several days later Patrick telephoned to invite her to dinner and afterward to view his CD-ROM. She said yes.

  He arrived at her apartment an hour and a half late. He was driving a new car, so elaborately appointed that sitting in it made her feel like a vegetable in a velvet box. He was dressed in an elegant suit that was an announcement of competence and public force. He wore a scent that had mixed with his sweat, and the smell of it made her imagine him naked and private, carefully daubing it on his neck, his stomach, his inner wrist. The contrast made him seem vulnerable and strangely innocent. He looked at her and smiled giddily. She thought, Orchid.

  “Did you notice?” he asked. “I’ve lost six pounds.”

  She hadn’t.

  He drove to an Italian restaurant housed in a thrusting edifice of steel and reflective glass.

  “I’m not dressed for this,” she said.

  “Oh, come on. It’s Seattle, and anyway you look great.”

  They ordered tasty, oily little pieces of food on large plates. Margot had wine in a deep glass. As she drank, her thoughts
leapt this way and that in reaction to this curious sound, to that burst of light.

  Patrick talked about depression, about how people were ashamed of it, how some people didn’t even know they had it because they thought it was a mental illness, which it wasn’t. “That’s a very unusual position for a pyschopharm to take, I know. But the kind of common, low-level depression that almost everyone seems to—”

  “If it isn’t a mental illness,” said Margot, “why do you treat it with medicine?”

  “It’s not medicine, in the usual sense. It’s a consciousness-altering drug, and it’s an appropriate modality considering the nature of what’s happening—I mean, the rate of flux! Everything’s in turn-around all around us, all the time! We aren’t organically equipped to deal. We just aren’t. I take it sometimes. Just every now and then.” He ate a morsel of eggplant. “I was going to suggest that you try a very light dosage of, say, Zoloft. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just that you seem a little . . . I mean, with Roberta and the stressful job, you know.”

  He talked about people whose lives had been changed by medication, and his voice was compassionate, as if he were putting a blanket over them. His compassion tickled like a blade of grass drawn slyly across her wrist and woke her memory of the solicitous condescension she had once resisted. He talked as if other people’s pain was one great, sore intimacy that he had seen and comprehended—and yet, Margot was suddenly irritated to think, it seemed he had never really looked at it. She had a cold swallow of ice water. It gave the tannic wine taste an arresting ache.

  After Dolores returned from the hospital, she and Margot had gone on a long walk together. It had been a lovely, tender day. Dolores smoked cigarette after cigarette. She walked very slowly, as if she were pushing against something that didn’t want to let her through. “Just a minute,” she said. She paused before somebody’s newly planted vegetable garden and dug around in her purse for another cigarette. The fresh-turned dirt of the garden was dressed in a pretty grid of Popsicle sticks and string.

  “My dad came to visit in the hospital,” she said. “It was the first time I’d seen him for two years.”

  “Yeah?”

  Dolores found a cigarette and lit it. “He sat on my bed and asked me how I was. I said, ‘Daddy, I want you to kill me.’” She flicked the match onto the garden, and they continued walking.

  “What did he say?” asked Margot.

  “Nothing. He just sat there and licked his lips like a nervous dog.”

  Margot wanted to ask Patrick if Dolores had ever told him about this. Instead, she talked about Roberta and the elaborate meditation exercises she had done when she was depressed. Patrick nodded vigorously. “That can work,” he said. His agreement made her irritated again. But the irritation immediately cooled and went sticky. How had her light, heartless, lovely bête noire become this silly man? The raw, breathing spirit of his youthful conceit had gone stiff and perfunctory; whether from neglect or the wear of age, she couldn’t tell. His light voice made her sleepy. The play of movement in the restaurant was a slow, tired fugue of decor and manners. She wanted to go home.

  As they walked to his car, a beggar looked at them with wistful half-resentment, as if the sight of them confirmed for him that at least some people were getting what they wanted: dates, restaurants, conversation in low tones.

  “A coincidence,” said Patrick. “The same week I saw you I ran into my best girlfriend, Tamara, who I haven’t seen for months.”

  “Your best girlfriend? I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned her before now. I mean, you’ve talked so much about Tricia and the other one.”

  “Well, Tamara didn’t affect me on an emotional level the way Rhoda and Tricia do. But she was my best girlfriend pound for pound, okay? She was beautiful by anyone’s standard, she was wealthy, and she had a cool job. She wired me flowers from France on Valentine’s Day, you know?”

  Her sarcastic thoughts were very loud, but he didn’t hear them.

  “Tricia used to stalk me when I went on dates with Tamara,” he said. “She’d sit outside restaurants in her car and watch us through the window. Isn’t that sick?”

  “Of whom?”

  Their footsteps counterpointed his wiry little silence. He opened the car door for her, and she sat in the stilling plushness. He got in on the other side and sealed them in with a slam. “Her,” he said. “Who else?”

  They drove in silence for some moments. She felt something hard in him, something little and gristly. Something that had heard her sarcastic thoughts and strove against them. But then she felt something else, which was generous, flexible, and full of movement. She felt it as surely as if he’d touched her. She’d irritated him, but still he wanted to like her, and that made her want to like him, in spite of everything. When he asked if she wanted to see his CD-ROM, she said that she would.

  His apartment was an expensive oblong with a vast, sad view of the city. A large old movie projector stood in one corner. An antique couch, its mauve cushions worn soft and forbearing, was a luxuriant ribbon in the stark room. They sat on it and had cognac in fancy glasses. She noticed a necklace made of huge red beads hanging from a doorknob behind the couch.

  “Oh,” he said, “that’s from a long time ago.” With a supple twist, he arched his back and reached for the beads with a long finger. An enshadowed vein showed on his extended neck. He dropped the beads in her lap. She handled them; the startling chunks of red were humorous and stately.

  He sipped from his drink with a dainty beaklike gesture. “A minor director who liked me gave it to me,” he said. “It seemed like a welcoming present from the world. We were out drinking one night, and she said a person who could wear this necklace could walk into any room and feel like he belonged there.”

  Margot thought of Patrick looking at the director with the same bare, needy eyes she had seen. She thought of the director wanting to console this look, to welcome it. “What a lovely thing to say,” she said.

  He frowned. “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I guess her career didn’t go anywhere, either.” There was a beat of silence like a held breath. He turned abruptly and looked at her. She was startled by the intense look on his face. “Do you think I could wear those beads now?” he said hopefully. “Or would I look silly?”

  She pictured him entering a room, wearing the red necklace over a cowl-necked shirt, regally flaunting his middle age. “I think you could wear them,” she said. “You’d have to wear the right top. But you could do it. It could look very cool.”

  “Yeah?” He looked doubtful. Then he brightened. “Let’s look at that CD-ROM.” He stood and regarded her with a faint seignorial expression so absurd it was endearing. “We have to go in the bed-room, if that’s okay.”

  He kept his computer beside his bed. “I don’t sleep well,” he explained. “Sometimes, if I wake up, I like to just put on my robe and get some work done without leaving the bed.” They sat awkwardly sideways on the bed, so they could look at the small screen. Patrick crossed his legs and slouched, pecking at the keys with an expectant air as if he were still delighted by the complicated little machine.

  All his files came up in pastel boxes. One of them was called Mad Money, another Nostalgia. He produced a little candy-wafer disk and tucked it in. A purple oblong with a tiny hourglass in it appeared on the screen. “This is going to change my career,” he said. The purple vanished, piece by jerky piece, revealing a cartoon of a man with a big pink head, trying to climb over a locked wall to get to a garden of flowers. The word DEPRESSION appeared over the picture. Then another oblong, with a woman’s face in it, bloomed on the screen. She was an attractive blonde in her mid-thirties, but she looked out of her oblong with the alarmed face of a horse in a burning barn.

  “Millions of Americans are suffering from depression!” she announced. “Yet the sufferers feel terribly alone!”

  “She looks like a lunatic,” said Margot.

  “Wh
at do you expect? She’s a psychiatrist.”

  “Depression is often accompanied by feelings of shame, of failure, of not-rightness.” The psychiatrist paused; her expression flared wildly.

  “If I saw this woman at a party, I’d avoid her,” said Margot. “I’d cross the room.”

  “You should’ve seen the other psychs I interviewed. I mean, yikes.”

  “In the past, depression was seen as an incurable personal flaw, a distasteful matter to be borne in silence.” The psychiatrist furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. “But not now. Now there’s help.” She batted her eyelashes and pushed out her lips as she spoke the h of “help.”

  “Oh, God,” said Margot.

  “Come on, she’s good-looking and she’s warm, sort of. Most people like her.”

  “Now you don’t have to be depressed!”

  “Why didn’t you read the script?” asked Margot. “You used to act.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Now,” said the psychiatrist, “you can be part of life again!”

  “I’m not visually appealing enough,” said Patrick.

  “I’d rather look at you than her.”

  Patrick said thank you, but he hardened in his cross-legged slouch. Margot could tell that she had made him anxious. She tried to feel remorseful, but instead she felt righteous. She remembered a party she had attended in Ann Arbor, right after she’d moved away from the house she’d shared with Patrick and Dolores. She had casually entered a conversation among three girls who were telling stories about some ridiculous guy. It was a minute before she realized that they were talking about Patrick.

  “But do you want to hear about the really awful thing?” The girl who asked had a plain face and a busy, bossy humor.